The story about how secure boot for Windows 8, part of UEFI, will hinder the use of non-signed binaries and operating systems, like Linux, has registered at Redmond as well. The company posted about it on the Building Windows 8 blog - but didn't take any of the worries away. In fact, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett, who originally broke this story, has some more information - worst of which is that Red Hat has received confirmation from hardware vendors that some of them will not allow you to disable secure boot.

There are also many reasons to implement secure boot, ranging from the legitimate (security is a very real concern on modern computers) to the illegitimate (anything proposed by the marketing department).

I'm also fairly certain that bitching about it ain't going to make it go away. But maybe we can propose coherent solutions that will allow our voice to be heard.

While I don't know the answers, here are two suggestions on my end:

Create a registry of devices where secure boot can be disabled and where there aren't restrictions on modifying the hardware. It won't force companies to introduce open hardware, but a few companies will produce open hardware to serve particular segments of the market. (This isn't exactly as complex as supporting Linux after all, since they're only providing an option to disable a feature.)

Maybe an independent bootloader could be implemented, one where the maintainers have a set of keys that hardware vendors are willing to distribute with their devices. They may have to play by the vendors rules while developing the bootloader, but that shouldn't be a problem as long as the OS developers don't have to play by the vendors rules.

So what is your proposed, and preferably non-confrontational, solution.